how to specify the unzip target directory

Question

Is there an option on linux zip command such that I can hard code the target directory it unzips into. For example, I would like to zip ./mydir files into myzipfile.zip but I want the unzip command to create a specific directory "projx" and expand the files which were under ./mydir to it.

zip -r myzipfile.zip mydir (-option to expand into 'projx' when unzipped? )

Answer 1

There is no such option, at least not for Info-ZIP. You have to create a directory projx yourself, move/copy your files into it and then pass it to zip.

If the directory already exists then just pass option -d to unzip to specify the target directory for extraction.

Answer 2

To do that there is an another way. You can flatted the entire contents of the zip file using following method. Target directory is "projx" and execute following command.

cd /projx && unzip -j /path/to/myzipfile.zip

Option -j is called "junk paths" and just dumps each file into the current directory instead of extracting any directory structure.

Answer 3

I don't know about a specific command line option, but you can use the following commands to reach you goal:

ln -s mydir projx
zip -r myzipfile.zip projx
rm projx

The first command creates a symbolic link, so that you can access the files in mydir also via projx. Then using Info-ZIP (tested with version 2.31) the symbolic link is dereferenced (this is the default, unless you specify -y) and the files are stored recursively:

adding: projx/ (stored 0%)
adding: projx/foo.1 (deflated 23%)
adding: projx/bar.2 (deflated 73%)
...

You see, the folder name is stored in the file, too -- so upon extraction the directory projx is created.

However, I can't think of a possibility to store absolute paths, but this is a bad idea anyway.